March 2010

If one thinks that the rise of e-mail and the ease of spam has drawn all the mutts, skels and bottom-feeding marketers and clients from telemarketing, think again.

The trick du jour is spoofing phone numbers to make CallerID-savvy consumers and businesses think the callers are not telemarketers or are from other and reputable companies so that they will pick up the lines. Only to get a nasty surprise.

These lowlifes' strategies are to push their trickery, profiting from them until the inevitable crackdown.

One of the biggest obstacles in setting up and sustaining telework programs--including work-at-home-agents (WAHAs) ---is obtaining supervisor and manager buy-in.

Too many of these individuals still practice oversight in the same way that the Greeks and Romans ensured performance of their galleys: only with virtual monetary whips for in reality a comparable scale of earnings and benefits.

Oh well so much for all the tens of thousands of dollars spent in performance management and QA tools, and lesser sums in IM, e-mail, 'whisper' features and audio and web conferencing tools.

At the same time too many organizations try and practice corporate togetherness and collegiality--amidst layoffs, closure, hours cutbacks, benefit cuts, wage freezes (and rumors of such), lousy supervision, high turnover, not to mention the crazed callers--and their managers fear that by hiring and sending agents home these poor souls will feel somehow left out....

As a Canadian, whose home is in that now-familiar backdrop mountains, sea and urban environs of Metro Vancouver, I first want to thank all of you who have either visited here for the 2010 Winter Olympics or who are or who will be coming for the Paralympic Games and/or have been watching or plan to watch the events on TV and online via fixed or mobile devices.

It has been an honour (no misprint) to allow us to share with you what is the biggest story of the 2010 Olympics and that is the coming together and the coming out of Canada, and Canadians permitting us to show for the first time how proud and united we have become as a nation, one that is truly a 'true north, strong and free'.

In 1978 I was working as a security guard in Edmonton, Alberta, which that year hosted the Commonwealth Games, whose athletes come from countries that had made up the British Empire. I was assigned to a Games cultural pavilion in asset protection and crowd management roles.